ft ground

Suki was in his study when she found a book he stole from the UCLA Library sometime in the 90s. The following sections of “The Implied Reader” are stained with the juice of something that doesn’t exist: Sections two hundred thirty-one, two hundred thirty-two, two hundred thirty-three, two. Hey you. Stop right there. I mean it. Seriously. I’ve come down from the violet skies to save the day, I’ve come down from the hills near Burbank, Calif., in which in December twelve persons were killed. I think I can’t be seen and all of a sudden I can be seen. The stupid editor removed my apostrophe just like a gratuitous quote from Anatole France. And I just appeared here, somehow, a week ago. In Burbank, with a fat husband, a son who’s probably going to be fat once his own kid grows up. Pretty much every night he falls asleep while texting me. And then when he wakes up the next morning, he texts me, apologizing a billion times all morning with odd smells stuck to his skin and sick dreams infecting my head. That book he stole from the UCLA Library, not my fat husband, but HIM, is able to lure me back to some alternate numbering schema, where an actual duplicate transaction could be identified, where that fat husband of hers had left off, would secretly read books like Nabokov and composite texts ‘cobbled together’ from texts of different types, as if in his mind there was uncertainty, some indecision or some conflict that caused him to remove his name from the list two days before the trip so he’d have disappeared. We’d have disappeared like a gratuitous quote from Anatole France.

Connie moves with ease about the hotel’s rooms and caverns. Though segmented and each a potential hiding place for her or for others, the unfurled carpets, tacked and trodden together, comfort her with the routes that happen to correspond with the spaces that everyone else wanders. Because the entire structure is just one place, the outlying, tapering town, the lake and its yoke of mountains, all one place, she seems to never stray from that still and empty expanse of carpet. A metallic, salty whisper coaxes up the elevator and the terror that without the sun she might swim down to clutch the seafloor instead of up through the black to a breath. Breathe out. Keep blowing to scatter confectioner’s guts like some dirty fake gold bolts of lightning casting silently back toward every door. Blow harder and eye sockets see black stars and sink against whatever direction she and trolley helicopter and blow until there is no air left and don’t want any more or stop still in the space left behind by all breath. The elevator door opens onto the narrow precipice. The sure trolley holds her up. The cavernous atrium fogs out to the disappeared brown smoke lobby below. The action of the big casters whirs from the carpet pattern. Voices hum way down in the atrium. Across the scabby earth crust a soft fading of voices is sensed by those who have once heard them rising in a locked room, beneath even the folding sound of cloth. Whether bodies fade with the voices or the songs of their organs are hackneyed into fatuity, those who may die in the hotel leave a likeness of their silence, at least an intractable gasp of the earthly air stuck in their lungs that all taste in the throat. But those who merely disappear, whose voices simply forgot to continue, and can’t reasonably think they had ever existed as the erstwhile peopling of the hotel, prevent any recognizable ebb in the hotel’s subterranean population. When a face appears regularly, independent of the less known necropolis of faces, and then ceases to return, the panic all at once of the lives felled by each moment in isolation colors the other as well. At the double door to the first suite Connie nudges her trolley against the low balustrade separating the scant ambulatory from the plunge and its echoing dirge. Those murmuring voices from below mill and become a single syllable sustained at her altitude above the lobby floor. Vaulting a few hundred feet in threads their tracery intertwines into something approaching her dry skin, a very large gauge needle bearing but not entering. She blinks at the black peephole. In the pale fleshtone of the door effuses a faint green like a tired, wracked copper statue or, her eyes dying, seeing dying colors. At each door she braces her form. Every door opens to a stumpy infinity of vile stains or, quietly descriptive of a human angel’s modest printed tunics and skirts, a meticulously made bed, perfect in execution but combated still by the rumples she can’t avoid without freshly laundered sheets. Connir can only pull back the comforter and quickly strip the bed. The faces of the range of people who might have stood back from the bed after it was made to survey it before turning to walk out of the room are vague, vapor-sketched, but peaceful. A master key opens the suite doors set back into a deep niche from the narrow ambulatory. No sunlight glows from the room. A wall of furniture packs the throat of the doors like the most ordered vomit of wooden and upholstered geometry sheared by guillotine in the paralyzed instant of disgorging. As flat of a thing as could be built of irregular things, it could have only been amassed from inside using the door like a mold. Each job Connie does alone. The first piece she dislodges is an upended cherry wood coffee table, worn and nicked tabletop first. Loveseat cushions with a striped pattern are packed between the legs of another table nested the opposite direction back out to the atrium. Even suites only have one coffee table. She sets the table aright on the floor of the ambulatory blocking most of its width. The mass in the door is black. No dust-caught sun secretes. Furniture collected from many rooms is pulled from the door throat. When the furnishing stacks above the balustrade near to the ambulatory ceiling Connie turns to the opposite side for her bone pile. She has excavated three feet into the room. She stands in that space and pull the doors shut and it is silver. The heavy whip stitching on her shoes is visible from light beneath the doors, nothing else. Shielded from the atrium seashell sound her breathing is voluminous. Draw in deep and exhale then slowly, quietly. Inhale and hold. A muffled voice, not sharp enough to form words, speaks in the little dark space with her. Spirits deep beneath a grave or people in next-door rooms don’t speak in words; they speak in masses like tides invisible but creeping and irrefutable because the ocean is so black and silent without them. She throws the doors back open. A voice with no face seemingly from behind the furniture quivers the wood grain in a low desk with its vibrations. Connie’s excavation reaches the front edge of the water closet door jamb about six feet into the room. The dislodged furniture now forms completely insurmountable barricades on either side of the outer door in the ambulatory. Only a running dive tumble over the balustrade absolves her of putting all the furniture back in place. The furniture left to excavate the water closet door will fill the niche in front of the doors. The voice from the furniture has grown clearer. If the voice comes from the water closet only a few pieces of furniture must be moved. Out come a circular writing table on a metal pedestal, a bale of cushions, and two luggage racks into the niche and there is the silver door handle. The door swings in and through the slot of space between the still lodged furniture and the water closet door jamb the full mirror reflects obliquely back to the shower curtain, bulged out, the mass slumped over the curb of the tub wavers but the voice is still lost. The sink is filled black and slick but in dark it probably is water. It smells like soap. The light switch is over the counter on the far side of the jamb; she can’t reach it. The next stratum of furniture she moves out stacks above the balustrade and into the niche blotting out the light from the atrium. She clambers over what is left in front of the door, turns on the light, hesitating; the voice still hums. The form isn’t moving. The curtain bulges in more detail with soft square edges like broken limbs. “Hello,” she says after waiting so long to speak back to the voice. The cadence and timbre of the voice remains unchanged addressing the ether still. Just pulling the leading edge of the curtain away from the tile she slides her head slowly into the shower stall. A silent tumbledown column of bedding, cushions, and towels fills the tub and limply offers a drapery hand over the curb between porcelain and oilcloth. Mandalas on the bedding of felled cypress clearings burned so black as each shivered in funereal drafts everything in her eyes swells with an opposite empty white light. Back between the wall of furniture where the front doors had let onto the beckoning abysm and the wall still whispering, louder now, she grows disoriented and breathless in a rhythm of words that repeat like a chant, “repeat, repeat, repeat.“ The two walls of furniture are identical now. Behind one the room and the voice, behind its twin the slow tumble of Connie in a cloud of furniture graying down through the atrium. “Submit me to the choosing of the building.” All paths being the same, all accidents, she throws herself into one of the rickety messes which topples into a heap in sunlight like powdered milk on death rattles floats. A television voice in the room sings, a chorus of women and men that she now easily ignores. Her limbs tingle and lips bleed warm narcotic pain on her tongue. Her eyes sparkle stars of the sleepless train. Subdued here she sleeps in what must be summer sun frozen, intermittently panicked by the failure of the indulgent accident to erase her finally from the hotel. A lumpy long form is bound down in the center of the impeccably made bed. In sunlight they are not beneath the earth’s surface but still are barely alive above it. Connie folds her arms in sagging arch over the furniture scree, puts her face in her hands, the sunlight skin red, and sleeps just a while.

Across midday hours the lobby alternately throbs and releases, less a heart than some fibrous sponge fed by many weak hearts. Groups coagulate around flotsam eddies of furniture several deep battling for small command. The chartreuseurs have shed their tennis shirts for blouses in all verdant shades, men and women, and those subdued blur somewhat into the scarf and blazer set whose evening attire is only slightly more cosmopolitan. Only the lanyards give plumage. Jack physicality by ordering an espresso from the café. However open his posture, however realistic his smile, without lanyard, without history, without contingent, without coterie, he remains as visibly invisible as a piece of dry food on a stranger’s cheek. Equidistant from multiple huddles of talkers and ambiguous in orientation to any one in particular, other, more spidery and capillary, men nod for their nods to gather up into a huddle like a suicidal fish. Jack shuffles amongst these tethered characters. He has a beard that, catching in cylindrical reflections, he notices, as if realizing of a sudden that he has a beard, is the unkempt and wiry fringe of a mad desert wanderer. Arched surfaces show the gradation of dust’s gravity. The swirl of cautious murmuring, unseen clattering and whirring, the seamless shadows of healed soles on loud carpet, as if hovering just above the floor, above holes they are doomed to fall through, a wavering metallic howl of high vibrations threads through all and all thread through his veins and arterioles entranced benevolence toward the chattering klatches. The conventioneer shoulders shimmer with raindrop quick rosy stars. The huddles seem to flower with warmth. The stomata widen betwixt the voices and arms until Jack is delirious amidst friendly debate. “Why don’t you believe that repetition is convincing? You keep repeating the same patterns. Take, for example, the celestial body that has worry and concern in its wake. Not just for hunger – but for fear, loneliness, uncomfortable temperatures, the simple chore of having to outrace light for a few moments, of waking up every single day to nothing.” “They never knew the pleasure of waking up every morning to find a hot, crisp loaf of Italian bread waiting behind the screen door.” “There are many things they didn’t know, like the destiny of men after death. Yet all things must die. By the simple process of repetition all things are conquered; it does not ask, yet all things answer to it; it does not call, yet all things meet it.” “That striking perceptual transformation, which I later found occurs as a gift when the individual has come into harmony that unites the whole into a grand foyer filled with all the doors to be entered, people to be put in closets, people to hide in closets. People to take their clothes off, people to…” “Indeed, all people, from all times and places.” The words clutter. Jack is entwined. The faces in the huddle all loom, seeming to close in with each twist of their thesis. Jack, at first shoulder to shoulder, now has his chest against the girl from the table who studies the scansion of these orations for a probable gap to cast with her position. As she smoothes down her scarf to speak Jack interjects, “But don’t you all believe that through this repetition you speak of, that we all are liberated, in each day, from the guilt of causality, from the burden of return? That our transgressions in those days past only return if we choose to repeat them?” “You must be mad,” the girl interjects, “those filthy things repeat as well, and they build, like sediment, into a formation that blots out the sun. You surely have not seen it in some time.” She flips about her badge on its fabric cord. The small chromed clip attempts to glimmer as Jack is ejected from the group in a conveyer of shoulders. He idles toward a small café table and sits. While resolving to have another go with a lesser klatch the last man in the hotel still in chartreuse tennis shirt approaches, the waist of his dungarees bowing outward and sagging under the moist duress of his apron, fixes his eyes on Jack’s, quickly darting to the empty chair across the table and then back, and sits. Jack pulls the pole of the small table between his knees until the edge jams his ribs so that something not of him becomes part of him to separate him from this man. The chartreuseur beams. Jack sees through the man’s teeth. Then a high pitched and a guttural voice at once together begins, “Do you…” but is quickly lost as Jack strains to maintain the composure of a man listening to another man but not hearing a single word he is saying. Jack is conscious only of the man’s tongue, growing larger, growing covered with linty swirls over buds like conflagratory boils waved beyond the outlined shades of his teeth and up through his false head to flop behind his eyes. Jack flees. The man still is beaming and, catching his face in the window of the café, Jack is inexplicably beaming. Through hallways bracing the emptiness of the voided tower his footfalls on carpet and hand on the ribbed wall-covering trace all the way to the top floor. The voices dwindle to murmurs and to a fog of sound turning into languid afternoon.

Two women were hiking with the dog in the rugged hills near the 3200 block of Canyon Drive, when the dog found a plastic bag in the brush containing the head of an Armenian male in his 40s with salt-and-pepper hair. There are additional body parts in the area. They connected the body parts with wax, and prepared a long piece of linen cloth with spices, which would protect his body from decay, and buried him.

In the cool column of columbarium air, from the buttressed sweeps of fortunate portals to open rooms the murmuring morning flushes, prickled by cackles, enervated already by crosstalking on the splintered circles woven in endless carpet. A dusty lane, settles and stilled ‘neath milk-colored borrowings of sunlight from the waxy undersides of bleached and meandering rush stems. Stalks twine up limping rails of a colorless fence; dried rose stains blot the sky and horizon and field and lane all at the fence fading. The reflection of turquoise, salmon flesh, and ungodly green drawn together in leaf and bloom also is still, unfocused across the landscape, all as if within a sheet of yellow thin and rippled plastic. Connie is high in a window. The lake is propped on its edge above the town and crowned by the vertiginous peaks that choke it and choke out the sky from the window. Out ‘neath the skirts of the hotel walls that no building abuts, pool deep, trapezoidal plazas, empty save devilish swirls of fog tailings on the stones and thin sun shot from gilt bits diminishing out into the narrowing alleys at each pinched boundary. The landscape atop the town and plazas is slightly darker. A bumbling, tumbling unstoppable cloud of smoke tooth yellow silently sinks the peaks, erases the alleys and isolates the plazas. Without vacant eyes burdened with indescribable social longing, but wild eyed, suppressing the disenfranchised rage of the enfranchised; not bowl cut, bare scalp patch eczema’d, nor anachronistically greased; nor fatted the way a vast pair of bluejeans is bedded with soft excelsior fat, but taut and absently crafted like glacial deposits against tennis shirt mold; bannered by cigar smoke, an endless parade of chartreuse streams with morning from the radiating alleys toward the hotel. In two abreast columns, men bound by mien, lost both at birth from recognition of sunlight hidden, reflecting, hidden from sunlight at birth, lost in construction of mien, each two talk as they march. Infrequent as the double torso and hips of the poetic colon, chinks in the throng kiss open views to a pale ponytail dangling, to pendulating in a small circle whose orbit is each time occluded by jostling of shoulders and underarm overflow. A faint, detached woman, fringed bangs and caret mouth breathes melancholy whistles over straight tiny teeth, transparent hair. A divot of her voice, usually struggling to emerge in completely silent and sunlit rooms, is sidelined and strained in the phalanx of boisterous, indistinct men. Their decorous chins sway. Their vital gesticulations trump recycled prattle. Maniac waving motions coalesce to hundreds of hairy parallelepiped digits ending abruptly at square nails all sweating to hold aloft enormous, malignant timepieces, and rubbing lubricious palms together desirously. The gluts of men thicken as they approach. The ruddiness of sweating faces burnished the gilt bits roseate and light ceased to play about the stones. The smiles are indistinguishable from leering. Her hair rises first, she, then like a foreign object slowly ejected from the earth, rises above the throngs’ hands idly passing her about. Her mouth taut and simple in black appears, silent through thick glass. The geologic creep that tumbled her into the upstretched hands above the crowd is sustained as they pass her about, not gently, but plodding methodically pulling her fleshy edges. Two take charge of her scarf and begin to twist as two others twist her torso t’other tendency and inversely her red, tight face is yanked out of sight as if she’d never been, though the shaded rose dash of her open mouth still stains shout-addled air.

Connie in constant smock skids again her trolley to its scuffed basement slip and smocked wends through the thinning crowds of the lobby to breathe and wait in silence for her night train. Attempting to lose herself at a long table, her elbows upon it facing back out across the lower strata of the great hall, still abyssal, where from this vantage the only visible people are abstract in the distance, a sharp, faint, yet distinctly rhythmic tapping is transmitted into her flesh. A man at the far end in chartreuse tennis shirt, sweat crescents, grin crescent, scanning the hall floor a few levels down for matching tennis shirt or upturned, like grins, or raking eye contact, automatically taps the pedestal supporting his end of the table in fleeting foot flicks. Each rattles through Connie’s unfocused eyes a shiver of colorful reconfigurations. As the dot end of the table’s bang a group huddles close, speaking, as though across the room, endlessly about life brought to the hotel from town. Their voices follow Connie through the corridors and stairs and escalators. He came of age, the final months of his companion’s struggle, three bodies, a jeering crowd taunted a suicidal teenager, one long knife and two blackjacks, the anticlimactic return to everyday life, exposed to the amoeba, and stabbed her partner before stabbing herself, many thousands of bats, vacillating about wanting to end her life, a winch lifting the boulder snapped causing it to crush her a second time, all while our physical bodies lie safely in bed, and then smothered him, lights sighted over Curie Lake, as he rummaged through a trash bin, accidentally, a hand-written letter assured him his exact double was being held, disappeared in columns of light, bore the mark and used a saw to cut off the hand, barricaded in a motel room on Grade Road, he pan-fried it, riot in a suburb, through the back door, behind the stage, in misty dawn, teeth chattering, another died yesterday cleaning his weapon, he saw someone floating, to cross a dust trail left behind by a comet, with a nail-studded paddle, silently watching the intricate design of millions of grains of colored sand pour into a nearby creek. The train slides in. Entranced amidst the cutting wheels against the rails, one after the before and more after these squealing though all as one indivisible from what cutting they might divide, Connie slides out on the train, then next rolling from tunnel to darkness indivisible where the faint clouds of star froth delineate a mountain range by where they show not and a vast, though bound, lake by where fog and frisk reflect all around. The train obliterating night lit from within all night loops the lake. Connie aboard, in constant smock not clearly awake or asleep but hidden from the hotel save for the long trace of reflected train windows on the lake always seen from some high, uncurtained windows until sliding into the tunnel again before dawn.

Chartreuse streaks in the air where chartreuse tennis shirts strike a stream of shuffling gesticulations through the sunken soup of the hotel lobby’s sunkenmost dry grotto. Franchisees stumble out of a ballroom flank, every tenth in a paper crown, the ‘crazy guy,’ each alternating tenth a self-diagnosed convention rabble-rouser, microcosmic emcee, ‘bürgermeister,’ king among kings. Two conferences share the hotel in the following days. Convention-goers of the other ilk, in blazers and light scarves rummage in cloth attaché cases. Badges on fabric ribbons swing or are kept in the armpit when bending over. It is early yet for both. Jack, in attendance for the blazer and scarf convention, watches the hall floor from above. Inaccessible vestigial hallways haunt the atrium. From high above the carpet at the bottom of the hotel is a perfect lake surface in a colander of a rainstorm with centers whose concentric rings obliterate each other in unresolved geometries. He touches his temple. The airy taste of skulls exploding like hollow tomatoes one at a time between his molars as they soar forty stories to the long unseen concrete beneath peeled back carpet, body first becomes ooze inside, and then the head snaps down and the skull and its secrets poof instantly and finally as dust from a shut book scatters. His skull never stops exerting pressure outward to stiffen itself into this tireless shape of bone. Secrets. Thousands inhaled, though mostly disappeared and black on black. Jack mostly could not remember his own. He checks in at a modestly pleated table where languid staffers still arrange their supplies, scan the tiny distance, and sit idly in anticipation. The table is in rigorous order. “Jack Trefry.” She, a felid young lady, pony tail and home-tailored smock tending to black and white in the virid tears of anxiety slicking his eyes, shuffles and shuffles leaves of stapled papers. She sighs. She clears her throat and pulls her seat back at first to look beneath the table then rising to point across the landscape to a verdant bosk of franchisees. “I think you must be with the chartreuse convention.” “No. I am here for this conference. I’m a keynote speaker.” “Yes, of course. Trefry. Let me look with the speaker packets.” “Yes. Please do.” “Still nothing. Perhaps you’ve already checked in.” He fingers his chambray for the edge of an absent silk scarf. “I’d think I would recall that. Could you provide me with a badge and one of those cords?” “I’m sorry. The badges are all premade. Lanyards come with the badges. We should be able to acquire one before the conference is over.” “I see.” “If you can wait.” “I am certain it won’t affect my access to the keynote address. Once my colleagues arrive of course they will allow me to access the proceedings with them.” “Perhaps.” “Of course. I’ll wait.” He stands against the nearest pillar watching over the silly girl’s shoulder. She eyes him deformed in the cellophane of the deciduating integument of badges. Men in tennis shirts eye him. After several shift changes at the table he drifts, always in movements slowed by hesitancy, appearing to occur and transpire just in the past, between pillars backed up to and orbiting little clustered klatches. In one outer shell he encounters the girl from the table yet again. She is jostled into facing him and watches over his shoulder where promenading peers pirouette about a looping staircase to the hall floor. “I look forward with hesitant anticipation to my address tomorrow night. It isn’t the marquis night of course, but it should be rewarding. The full contingent of the conference will still not have arrived yet or those that were just arriving from late afternoon journeys will mill outside the breakout rooms or the ballroom reconnecting, a distracted gregarious taking hold of eyes looking for eyes like rail yard switches that would linger just through my introduction as they filter in with ‘Well I suppose we should see about this.’ I won’t blame them for their ambivalence and ignorance. The complex system of canonization, you no doubt are currently scuttled by, impossible to describe to one outside of this mindset, but tacitly regarded by each of us, has managed admirably for so many years to keep the community from knowing who I am. Only fortuitously, and almost like a daydream, were some of my unpublished writings passed above the noses of some of the correct folks and having made small rounds in their splendor and reach, they were able to secure me possibly a fissure in the cloak through which to whisper. Whether the garment opened wide to me I wasn’t concerned. I was quite certain that I wasn’t for the world. Yet I carried seeds. Seeds don’t take long to plant. Has my lanyard been found yet?” She is not aware of him speaking. He stands in the lobby through the opening breakout sessions smelling coffee and oranges from appointed hospitality tables. The afternoon smolders and evening dim settles like torchlight rising. The carpet has worn to white strands of smoke between the small meeting rooms. “This first night is always throwaway.” The building itself pulses. In an upper floor hallway Jack is overcome with vertigo as though standing in a wheel. He falls back against a wall where he sits and doesn’t sleep that night. In the morning he returns to the table where the same young lady attends. “I’d really like to have a badge.” “I’m sorry, I told you yesterday that I don’t have one premade for you.” “But I’m a speaker today, its been known for months I’m sure, how am I supposed to be admitted to my own talk?” “Well I’m sure that has all been arranged and you can just go in with the person who you have coordinated with.” “Do you at least have a blank card that you can write on?” “Yes. Here.” “Can you write on it so it is more official?” “I guess. Here, give it to me.” “Write: John Trefry, Omaha, Speaker.” “Oh, OK Mr. Trefy, I’m sorry, here.” “Do you have a lanyard?” “No, just a sleeve, we ran out of lanyards yesterday at main registration” “What am I supposed to do with it then?” “Well you really only need it to get into the breakout sessions, the main addresses, like yours, are open.” He spins around and attempts to tuck the card in his breast pocket just enough that the surname and the word ‘Speaker’ are proud above the welt, then takes five steps before it falls to the carpet.

His head in his hands, with his jeans pulled up but still no shirt on. It wasn’t the fact that he had just removed his heavy helmet and shook out his shoulder-length blond hair in the freshness of the ocean breeze, but that his turtleneck, curled in a ball at his feet, was totally drenched with sweat. His long face was quite solemn and his big ears hung dejectedly on rusty hinges. Gaping holes in the seam of his closed mouth ran with salty saliva and and the distant singing spun through his head… Adam vomited up his lunch onto the grubby sidewalk. Now dressed in fawn slacks and blue polo shirt, totally drenched with sweat, Mr Santorum proceeded to crawl onto the steel grating that covered the basement window wells, in the middle of the night, and scrape the vomit into the gravel below. “You looked like you were possessed by a demon,” Phineas says.

The observations themselves didn’t prove the existence of a ginkgo biloba tinnitus cure. Rather, the idea of a ginkgo biloba tinnitus cure explained observations so well that those in the know came to believe it really existed. Uncovering your anger is like digging for gold. One day, technology might be good enough to allow it to be actually observed. But we don’t need to wait until then before we start believing in it.

To be playing amidst the falling shower of Leonids thirty-three and one-third years ago when she was only thirty, and I’ll bet there was no one making her go to a weight-loss camp, which is probably impossible anyway, have her choose between a night out clubbing or watching a classic film like Ghostbusters, Young Frankenstein, The Frisco Kid, or Hot Fuzz. Yet they sang through the sky and the trickle of the water over rocks was mixed with the small croaks of frogs and toads. They sang through the sky and all the angels danced with tears in their eyes but one angel in particular stopped to take a crap. While he was doing his business, I saw something white coming down the river towards him. But lo and behold, ’twas a chariot, steered by a large liv’ried toad with a tree on his head. Hung from the tree was the final piece to the puzzle: a sign that read “Hands Off Medicare and I like being fat and I love fat men.”